In order: dying, and somewhere south of two minutes. Death may take a little longer, but loss of consciousness will come sooner.
Where the artery is damage will affect how treatable it is. When you have some distance from the torso (the mid-to lower thigh) you can apply a tourniquet above the wound and possibly keep the victim alive long enough to get them medical attention. In the upper thigh or near the groin, unless you already have EMTs on site, you probably won’t have enough time to effectively clamp it.
That said, the last fifteen years have seen an explosion in technologies designed to counter catastrophic blood loss. This includes things like QuikClot and HemCon. The former dehydrates blood on contact inducing rapid clotting. The latter becomes highly adhesive and is supposed to seal into the wound (though the survival rate was reportedly only around 10%.) Of random interest, early iterations of QuikClot came in powdered form (the current version is saturated into gauze), it used a different mineral base, and had an exothermic reaction on contact with blood, resulting in second degree burns. This saw military use in the early 2000s, and never made it to the civilian market.
There’s also NovoEight, which, if I’m reading this correctly, is recombinant blood (or more accurately, just the clotting factor from human blood). This is sold in powdered form and needs to be reconstituted immediately prior to use (once reconstituted it only lasts about 4 hours). Technically, this stuff is intended for treating hemophiliacs who were seriously injured or going in for surgery.
An earlier iteration, NovoSeven was used experimentally in the mid 2000s. It can be effective for managing blood loss in cases of severe trauma, but is also risky to use, as it in can result in arterial thrombosis, (clotting in the arteries that obstruct the flow of blood). In case it wasn’t clear, this is a very bad thing, though preferable to bleeding to death. I don’t know if NovoEight still has that risk, though, it would surprise me. Neither is actually approved for use on non-hemophiliacs, but it is an option of last resort. (The primary difference between NovoSeven and NovoEight appears to be how the drug is produced, and the potency (NovoSeven is stronger, and indicated for patients who have no clotting factor, while NovoEight is intended for patients with a congenitally deficient clotting factor.)
If you can get the victim into surgery, then it’s possible they may survive. But, this is still an extremely dangerous injury to suffer, and even medical attention doesn’t mean the victim will survive, only that they might. From what little I know, the actual procedure is just to clamp the artery and suture it back together. The problem is that the femoral artery moves a lot of blood, making it harder to control, and causing the bleed out to occur faster.
So, their options aren’t that appealing.
-Starke
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This observation about the femoral arteries is behind one of my main beefs about fantasy “armour” (mostly female but not always, I’m looking at barbarians in bearskin kilts) which leaves the thighs exposed. Of course so much else is exposed as well that an opponent would be spoiled for target choice, and a lot of those targets are just as effective as “off with his head” or “run through the heart”.
Here’s William Fairbairn’s target timetable for knife attacks to the arms and upper body:
The femoral arteries are shown but not tagged or timed. Fairbairn and his Commando trainees would have been doing the attacking with this weapon, the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, which is often mistakenly called a “stiletto” even though it’s designed to both stab and cut:
In modern parlance “stiletto” gets applied to any knife or dagger with an notably narrow blade, but historically it meant murder-needles like these.
Since they had no defensive function whatsoever,
carrying one might be treated as an “inchoate crime” (USA) or “proof of intent” (UK) like the old British offence of “carrying housebreaking tools by night” - unless you had a truly superbly excellent reason for being on someone else’s property with a jemmy or prybar, glasscutter and lockpicks, you were nicked, chummy.
Likewise, anyone found with an assassin’s weapon - probably concealed, at that - would instantly become a Person of Interest to the city watch. Stiletti were apparently used for a “stab-and-stir” attack - after the thrust, the hilt was wiggled around so the buried blade did internal damage out of all proportion to the little hole it made. Nasty. It makes me wonder if the “Gunner’s Stiletto” etched with bore measurements wasn’t an attempt to legitimise carrying these vicious little spikes - and indeed, if it worked as an excuse if you didn’t have a couple of cannon to call your own.
A well-honed, properly sharpened sword would have the same effect as the injuries on Fairbairn’s chart, with no need for head-cleaving or limb-lopping - indeed some ways of using a longsword in “half-sword” style without armour seem like a cross between dagger- and bayonet-fighting…
…with more typical sword-wielding available as required…
The description of clotting agents like QuikClot reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago: that in the 17th or 18th century the British Royal Society (or it may have been the Royal College of Surgeons) set up an experiment to test a new styptic powder. They were going to amputate the arm (or leg?) of a criminal due for execution, who would receive a free pardon if he volunteered and survived. (IIRC he did volunteer, but the experiment was banned and the man received a reduced sentence for his courage.)
I couldn’t remember which book it’s in or find anything about it on line, but I did find this report of a styptic test from 1694 which sounds like the period equivalent of QuikClot et al, and I’m also reminded of the blue-glowing medicinal goo in “Predator 2″…
So many fictional injuries seem to represent arm and leg injuries as “just a flesh wound” to be lightly shrugged off, that it’s worth remembering there really are some injuries where “I ain’t got time to bleed” - not because of macho posturing but because it’s only a few seconds before the lights go out.
This isn’t a suggestion that fictional characters have to die or be long-term incapacitated every time they get chewed up; that would make for some very short books and films, so - depending on the story - there’s prompt medical attention, healing magic, a bacta tank or the sheer luck associated with plot armour to get them up and running again. But it’s worth remembering that a sensible nod towards the realism of wounds can add a lot of drama.